


Frank Iero, AI

by snarkydame



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Detective Noir, F/M, M/M, Multi, cyperpunk AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snarkydame/pseuds/snarkydame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Crash disrupted all kinds of things.  I help find the missing pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frank Iero, AI

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akamine_chan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamine_chan/gifts).



> Written for no_tags, and the prompt "post-apocalypse or cyperpunk detective agency." I couldn't choose.

* * * *

 

The Crash wasn't really a crash. More of an info dump. A massive, unregulated download that more than doubled the size and tripled the population of the already enormous HELENA – the virtual world host to countless games and educational programs. 

The hastily written codes they built to handle it . . . couldn't.

And suddenly, there were millions of new Users – desperate, panicked rookies – thrown into a VR world full of melting borders, static, and rogue code. Made it easy for people to get lost. Literally, metaphorically, both.

Was throwing half of humanity into the System better than losing all of civilization to plague and darkness in the real world?

Don't ask me. I've never known any world but this one.

My name is Frank Iero, AI.

The Detective.

 

* * * *

 

He held the door open when he came into my office, chewing on a thumbnail and studying the plaque. Looked like an Early Adapter, at least, if not one of the Old RPers. That was unusual, but not many rookies had their avatars decked out in gear like his – the coat looked dragonseared about the sleeves, and his sword belt had worn a shiny stripe across his hips. Or, huh. That wasn't a sword, was it? More of a lightsaber. Been in a couple different sorts of Sectors, then. A traveler.

I waited. Not for long, of course. Patience is in short supply.

“Thinking of setting up your own shop?” I asked. “Comparing fonts?”

He rubbed a finger over the lettering – IERO INVESTIGATIONS – and smiled, lopsided and real. “I like the burnt edges. Must have taken quite a bit of coding.”

“Eh. It's not that hard if you know what you're doing.” I watched him, but he didn't seem nervous about the code-work – just curious. 

“It's good detail. Most people around here just use the standard pop ups.”

“It's a stable Sector. Most of the people around here don't much mess with the code. Most people anywhere wouldn't know how.” Even that pointed comment didn't seem to phase him. 

He turned around, finally. “I've heard of you,” he said.

“Everyone's heard of me.” I was fucking famous.

“I need your help.”

“Stands to reason.” No one sought me out to chat about the weather.

“I need to find some people,” he said, hooking his hands in his coat pockets. “I've been looking since the Crash.”

“You and half the world,” I said, and meant it. Most of the new additions hadn't been conscious when they'd been connected – no choice of landing, no Guides. HELENA was a big, big place to wake up in.

“I've heard you can help me.”

“Depends. Can you afford me?”

“Depends,” he said, smiling that same lopsided smile. “What are you charging this week?”

“Hmmm.” Charging coin was pointless – all I had to do was rewrite some code. Pull it out of the damn ether. Bartering was more for fun than anything else.

“Who am I looking for?”

“A ninja,” he said, “and a bird. At least, that's the latest description I have of him.”

Well. He  _had_  been in some interesting Sectors.

I rubbed a finger through the dust I'd allowed to settle on my desk. It's all about atmosphere, this detective business. I was particularly proud of the shadows cast by the slowly spinning ceiling fan.

“For a ninja, and what may or may not be a bird? I'll need a save crystal, Blue Grade. And a Trans-Sector warp key.” Couldn't spin those out of raw code. Too unstable without without authorization. Which meant they were rare, and getting rarer.

Theory was, there wasn't anyone left on the outside to authorize new ones.

He held out a hand. After a moment, in which I tried and failed to remember anyone who knew who I was offering to touch me voluntarily, I took it.

“I'm Gerard,” he said. “I'll take those terms.”

 

* * * *

 

Gerard was something you just didn't see much of anymore – someone who'd been online during the Crash. Someone who'd seen HELENA twist and tremble, stretch and stutter; seen the warp and weft of their old playground ripped out and rewoven. 

Let me rephrase that – he was someone  _sane_  who'd gone through that. There were plenty of the others. I could hear them sometimes, screaming in the code.

Actually, let me rephrase that again.  He was someone  _mostly_  sane who'd gone through that. And I was pretty sure his brand of sane had been pretty similar before the Crash – there was a well-worn familiarity about his eccentricities. 

He left colored footprints on the ground when he walked. They flowed through the spectrum, red to yellow to green to blue, before fading into nothing. A holdover, he said, from a spell he'd cast in a dungeon crawl. The Crash had made it permanent. 

I would have offered to fix it, but I thought he liked it.

Words would appear on his skin sometimes – phrases written in black marker. They'd disappear in a few minutes, usually. I didn't know if he coded them intentionally, or if they were another glitched out program he'd neglected to erase.

He still had his experience meter. They'd been real popular with the RP crowd before the Crash. But he reset his every time we stopped to rest.

“Wouldn't be fair to level up without the rest of the party,” he explained. As if he was expecting to meet up again with them, to finish that dungeon crawl and divide up the loot.

Mostly, I was charmed.

Hey, it was nice – hanging out with someone who didn't seem to think I was part of the scenery. He hadn't called me an NPC once.

We took the long roads – minimal Gate hopping, no warps at all. I kept a background scan running, alert to shifts in code and program. I was pretty sure Gerard had a passive sensor on as well, in case we came within range of his friends. We didn't.

Neither system was entirely reliable these days, of course. HELENA was treacherous now. She'd fuck with you.

So I wasn't entirely surprised by the ambush.

Okay.

I was surprised. That's why it was an  _ambush_. But I shouldn't have been.

 

* * * *

 

First I knew of the problem was the rippling in the Wall – the boundary between not-at-all-real and real-for-all-intents-and-purposes. There were strange things on the other side of the Wall. Things like me, maybe. But also things like the pixilated nightmares that dropped on our heads.

Somehow blurred and jagged at the same time, they actually hurt to look at. Too many limbs, or none at all, too many blind eyes glowing with damaged code.

They opened their mouths – empty void, no teeth, no tongue – and  _screeched_.

You ever see those old holovids set in Good Old Days? The ones where the kid had to beg her brother to get off the phone so she could use the “internet?” Remember the sound it made?

Think of that sound. But shattered. Picked apart and reassembled in a blender, with the whine of hot wiring and the buzz of a dying fan thrown in for harmony. And crank up the volume. Loud. So loud your teeth ache. So loud you can see the textures of the sky shivering in response, and the solidity of the ground beneath your feet comes into question.

Gerard grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt and yanked me away from the nearest impossible, screeching thing. The lightsaber was already out of its scabbard – it hissed into a sweep of vividest red, right through the thing's neck.

The saber flickered. Went out. The thing . . . smiled.

Gerard shook the hilt, incredulous. “It's drained!” he said. Absurdly, he sounded  _offended_.

“Run then, you mad fuck!” I said, and grabbed his arm.

We Scarpered. Capitol S.

 

* * * *

It's something I can do, if I have to. Not something I ever liked to do – it always made me feel . . . less than real. Less, even, than real-for-all-intents-and-purposes. Like the construct that I am, that we all actually are, for all the Users' arguments. Fragile code.

It's worse now, post-Crash. HELENA's fabric is stretched a lot thinner. There's less substance on which to pretend to cast a shadow.

But I can erase the bits of program that hold the code that means _Frank Iero is here_  and rewrite it in a different level of the program, in any space I can find to fit it. And I can do the same for any other bit of code that I can touch.

Sorry, Gerard.

 

* * * *

 

I let him retch in relative privacy, carefully looking at everything but him while he pulled himself back together. There was no sign of the impossible things. But I wasn't familiar with this place – it was either one of the added bits they tacked on to make room for the influx of Users right before the Crash . . . or it was one of the bits pushed out of the place by the expansion. 

Lost Sectors, we called them. Not because we didn't know where they were, but because we didn't know what they  _had been_. They weren't recognizable. And they weren't at all safe.

“What the fucking hell was that?” I heard, and turned.

Gerard lay flat on his back, legs splayed wide and hands over his eyes. The letters on his arm spelled  _Fly Away_. And looked a lot darker than usual against his retched-out pallor. 

“Here.” I tossed him a health pack. “That should help.”

“Did you take one?” he asked. He didn't bother to catch the pack. It lay on his stomach, flashing its cheerful yellow light.

“Nah.” I mostly used them to barter anyway.

I sat down beside him, braced my hands behind my back and stared up at the static in the sky. “So,” I said, keeping a watch on a particularly gnarled cluster of code. “we've looked for your ninja and your bird through most of the stable Sectors in this quadrant. The best lead we've gotten puts the bird on a pirate's shoulder in New Detroit, but there's been no sign of the ninja.”

“Well,” he said, strangely philosophically for someone who'd been searching for as long as he has, “there wouldn't be. Pretty stealthy, ninjas.”

I sighed.

“And that wasn't the right bird.” He pulled his hands down as he said it, giving me Earnest Look # 3 – the one with the wide eyes and the crooked frown. “She wouldn't let him go to New Detroit alone, and she's banned in that quadrant.”

“How'd she manage that?” I asked, with real interest. New Detroit was a cesspit. I didn't even know you  _could_  get banned there.

He grinned. “You know the Mod put up a statue of himself in the city square?” I did. It had made the daily bulletin, to a chorus of jeering.

“She tweaked its code. Now it calls out a list of quotes on the hour, every hour – everything the Mod ever tried to pretend he hadn't said. No one's been able to break her code. They called her the Code Witch, and banned her from the whole quadrant.”

He sounded so fond as he said it, eyes gleaming. 

That bothered me.

It bothered me that I didn't know why it bothered me. So I stood back up and slapped the dust off my butt, and pretended that it didn't.

“Frank.” When I glanced down, Gerard was sitting up, picking at a loose thread in his jeans. “What were those things?” His eyelashes threw shadows on his cheeks, and I thought, _oh. He's beautiful. That's what it was._

After a moment, I answered. “They weren't supposed to be there. They weren't supposed to be anywhere. 

“They're Old Code. From before HELENA's stable release. They lurk. They starve. They die out."

I looked away.

“Don't feed them anymore batteries.”

* * * *

This sector looked like the smooshed together remnants of an Old West simulation and a racing game, with what may have been a culinary class thrown in for seasoning. It was more confusing than threatening, but the few Users we found seemed worryingly detached. They barely spoke, unless we spoke first, and then there was a disheartening sameness to their answers. 

Almost like the scripts for village NPCs.

After the fifth User answered Gerard's query about the bird with “They sell love birds to the south. But make sure you take a pair,” Gerard finally noticed I'd stopped asking questions of my own.

“What's going on,” he demanded, “what's wrong with them? You know.”

“It happens sometimes,” I said. There was a cat across the boardwalk, weaving through the legs of a girl in a chef's coat and a satin bonnet. The cat, just a bit of coded fluff, had more life in it that she did.

“ _What_  happens.” Gerard's voice was flat.

“Usually in Sectors like this one, too damaged to get bulletins. Users get stuck here. They can't find a warp gate. They try to walk out and find them selves right back where they started, like the Sector developed some sort of gravitational pull. 

“Things go wrong. They get scared.

“They start to wonder what's going on outside. To think, maybe they've fixed it. Maybe they can go home now. Maybe it hasn't really been as long on the outside as it has been here, and their bodies are still breathing, still connected.

“They try to log out. They try again.”

I shake my head, not looking at the cat anymore. Gerard stared straight ahead. “They try often enough,” I said, “and they damage their code. That sort of code . . .”

I paused long enough that Gerard looked over, curious. Concerned.

“It can't be repaired. Not quite.” And I shrugged, just a little, to show how much it didn't hurt, that failure. I could repair my own code, an AI's code. As easily as I could fill my bank account, or change the speed of rotation for my ceiling fan. Like rewriting the plaque on my door. But a User's code? 

I couldn't change that.

“Frank . . .” 

I shrugged again. “They usually have some remnant of reason under all that,” I said, walking South. "Let's see what they mean about the love birds.”

 

* * * * 

South, there was a shifting curtain of energy, so bright it washed out the Sector, turned it black and white. 

It was a good look for Gerard. I like to imagine it suited my Detective image, but I suspect it just made me look ill.

There was something behind the curtain. Vaguely visible, a structure of some sort.

“What is that,” I wondered. “A pagoda?” I squinted hard. A round roof, thin columns. There might have been a figure there, inside the supports.

Gerard leaned forward, eyes sharp. “No. That's a birdcage.”

He started forward at a run, and I caught him just in time.

“Don't touch it, you idiot! Do you want to fry yourself into the void?”

He strained unconsciously against my hold, nose a bare inch from the curtain. The light made his face featureless, blank but for his dark and burning eyes. “That's her,” he said, certainty like steel bones in his voice. “That's Lindsey. That's  _Lindsey_.” 

I growled to push the jealous anger down. “We'll get to her. But  _don't touch that_.”

I let him go, cautious and slow. He didn't move.

I paced the circumference of the curtain. Through it, I thought I could see Lindsey turn to watch me, a set of wings flapping over her left shoulder.

When I reached Gerard again, the words _rescue me_  were fading from his wrist. My heart hurt, and I wondered if it had been Lindsey's words, the Code Witch's words all along, inked on his skin.

I didn't know why that mattered. Why it was any of my business.

There were no switches, no buttons, no breaks in the code. Just an energy curtain, impassible and strange.

“I can't risk rewriting the curtain itself,” I told Gerard. “It's too fluid. It'll wash me under.” I braced myself for his protest.

But Gerard nodded. “You're right, it's too dangerous. I'm going to try to dig under it. Can you shore up the ground as I go?”

I closed my mouth with some effort. “Yes. Yes, I can do that.” He was . . . He was something special, anyway.

“Tell me if I'm not far enough under the curtain,” he said, already pulling a shovel from his inventory. “I won't risk losing you along the way.”  It actually sounded like he meant it.

He set the blade against the ground, jumped and landed with both feet, pushing it deep. But before I get a feel for the ground's code, it twitched. And behind it, I could feel the Wall.

“Wait!” I cried, already leaping forwards. Behind the curtain, the shadow that was Lindsey was pressed against the bars of her cage. She might have been yelling.

Gerard stumbled back, but the Old Code was spilling out of the broken wall – a flood, a wave, a wretched, screeching tide of hunger and rage.

Gerard pulled a sword – not his lightsaber, but a blade. I could see the things try to eat it, but they could not absorb its code like they could the saber's battery. It didn't hurt them very much, but it confused them, worried them, and they flowed away from it like it was distasteful. Away from it, and towards the curtain.

The curtain, which held so much more energy than we did, in our paltry bits of code.

“Gerard!” I cried “Herd them towards . . .”

“I got it!” There was excitement in his voice, and he swung the sword like a cattle prod, egging them away from us. 

The first of the things reached the curtain, and lit up like a fire cracker. Sparks raced across its blurred edges, and it seemed, somehow, to stabilize. The jagged bits came together, and the curtain, almost imperceptively, dimmed.

The other things paused.

Gerard held himself still, mid swing, sword in the air. I watched the code, my eyes so wide they hurt.

And the things swarmed the curtain.

 

* * * *

They grew, the impossible things. Hulking dark and massive, more solid now. Then unholy screeching had been traded for some truly disturbing sounds of feeding.

But the curtain was coming down. I could see it waver. I could see Lindsey clearly, crouched and ready in the birdcage. Gerard's bird was on her shoulder, wings spread for balance, ready to fly. 

The curtain fell, finally, and Gerard waded into the mass of things with a war cry. This time, his sword pierced the things' hide with a crunch of bone and a spray of blood.

“Unlock this gate!” I heard a clear voice say, even as I reached to unravel the thing between me and Gerard. “Set me free so I can help him!” 

And I heard the desperate plea beneath the pride. It was the same plea I could feel wound through my own code.

 

* * * *

 

The lock, at least, was simple.

 

* * * *

Lindsey hurled herself into the fray with a bloodcurdling set of oaths and two knives as long as her forearms. The bird, gold and green and blue, and far too solidly coded to actually be a bird, went for the things' blind, glowing eyes. 

They were winning, the three of them. The things were too real now. They'd eaten too much of this world's code, and could now be hurt with it.

They could now be rewritten, if somebody knew how.

And I did. I did, better than anyone.

 

* * * *

When it was done, Gerard had his arms around her, sword falling to the ground before blinking back into inventory. Lindsey's knives were sheathed, and the bird was flying in wider and wider circles around them both.

I stood, and kept my hands in my pocket. I wanted to leave, but I couldn't leave them here, with no Gate.

So I watched the bird, and read its code, and wondered who had managed to rewrite Gerard's brother as a bird. It was still a User's code. I couldn't change it. 

It was a mystery.

Someone had trapped the bird, and Lindsey, in a tricky sort of trap. I didn't know of anyone with the know-how or the motive for that. And so that another mystery.

Well. I am a Detective. Of course I wanted to know.

But when I had entirely decided to leave it be, to drop them off somewhere safe to continue their own stories while I perfected the beat of my ceiling fan and the fall of shadows in my office, Gerard stood in front of me, holding Lindsey's hand. 

“Lindsey,” he said, while I tried to hold myself tight and safe against his smile, “this is Frank.”

She smiled, and her eyes were as bright as his. “Well, go on then,” she said.

And there, in a sector full of mangled programs, standing beside his wife and under his brother's wings, Gerard kissed me, for the first time.

I swear, I felt my code rewrite itself.

 

_fin_   


 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Frank Iero, AI by snarkydame](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1703708) by [fire_juggler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_juggler/pseuds/fire_juggler)




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